“Beware the altar of science: We are more than data and chemicals”

 

Here, for example, is the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin describing in his book This Is Your Brain On Music how our brains can extract audio information from the chaotic collection of air molecules bouncing against our eardrum:

Imagine that you stretch a pillowcase tightly across the opening of a bucket, and different people throw ping-pong balls at it from different distances. Each person can throw as many ping-pong balls as he likes, and as often as he likes. Your job is to figure out — just by looking at how the pillowcase moves up and down — how many people there are, who they are, and whether they are walking toward you, walking away from you, or are standing still. This is analogous to what the auditory system has to contend with in making identifications of auditory objects in the world, using only the movement of the eardrum as a guide.”

And here, in contrast, is the author and poet Diane Ackerman on the human experience of music:

‘Amazing Grace’ is a good example of that lighter-than-air sort of hymn, full of musical striving and stretching, as if one’s spirit itself were being elongated. Think lofty thoughts and sing that elevating tune, and soon enough you will feel uplifted (even despite having to sing such unmelodious words as ‘wretch’)… Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and, in that sense, it behaves so much like our emotions that it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus free us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of words.”

Levitin does give us fascinating insight into the mechanics of how we hear music. But Ackerman gives us insight into what that’s like.

We may well be living in an age where our daily lives are mediated by technology, by the outputs of code, by the fruits of science.

And we may well be living in an age where the fruits of science and technology are helping to make our efforts as marketers more efficient, better directed, more useful, more timely, more interactive, more responsive, and so on.

We are right to be entranced and fascinated by what all this offers up.

But we would be well advised not to worship at the altar of science and technology too much, too slavishly, or too uncritically. Or to reduce human nature to the jiggling and wiggling of atoms.

“Just move me, dude”, exhorts Dan Wieden.

If we wish to do that – and the evidence clearly demonstrates that this is the cornerstone of effective advertising – then we must think like artists, not just scientists.

http://martinweigel.org/2013/07/12/beware-the-altar-of-science-we-are-more-than-data-and-chemicals/